Guests on Our Country: The Challenges of Creating an Indigenous Approach to Tourism

To underpin effective management of aesthetic values of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, a new systematic approach to assessing aesthetics has been developed that accommodates the vast scale and complexity of the dynamic Reef environment. Equally important, the method encapsulates the idea that aesthetic values arise in the experience of place and sensory responses to it by recognising both environmental and experiential attributes of these values. Our research defining and ‘conceptually mapping’ these attributes provides a new approach to understanding and managing aesthetic values in large ‘natural’ landscapes.